Mira Duric - The Strategic Defence Initiative: US Policy and the Soviet Union

Located in an endnote at the back of his book The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, one of the leading scholars in US foreign policy John Lewis Gaddis, makes a striking (and wholly accurate) claim. It appears to have gone unnoticed in the debates regarding the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in USSoviet relations and the end of the Cold War. It has not been repeated in any subsequent books or journal articles. Gaddis states that it is worthwhile considering the contention that there are moments in history when a single dramatic development can galvanize a country into taking action Sputnik had this effect on the United States in 1957 and the reaction to SDI inside the Soviet Union may have been an example of that.1

Writing after the end of the Cold War, many commentators have dismissed the importance of the Strategic Defence Initiative. They argue that because it was not ready for imminent deployment after US President Ronald Reagan had proposed it (on March 23 1983), and was not technically feasible, therefore it was `not important. SDI critics believe that there is no substantial evidence to show that the SDI ended the Cold War. This book is a response to these critics.

During the beginning of the end of the Cold War (in the early 1980s) the film The Day After (which President Reagan saw on October 10 1983) dealt with the horror of a nuclear war.2 Advertisements came through letterboxes advising the British public what to do in the event of a Soviet first-strike nuclear attack. Nearly two decades later, the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden) occurred. A realization during the 1983, and after the 2001, case that the threat of attack albeit nuclear or non-nuclear was apparent. In the early 1980s the threat of a nuclear war hung over the world because of the intensification of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. SDI critics fail to acknowledge the fear felt by the masses of a nuclear attack (during the early 1980s) in their accounts. It was a time when the mere suggestion of a space-based defence (the SDI) was perceived with very great alarm by the Soviet Union. If only because of the environment of the Cold War, the SDI a product of this environment would inevitably impact greatly on the Soviet Union. That is why when the US President took to the airwaves to announce a space-based defence shield which could render nuclear missiles impotent, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail S. Gorbachev took the so-called SDI threat extraordinarily seriously. The SDI, when viewed against the psyche of the Cold War of the early 1980s, could only appear important. The SDI in reality was not a threat. It was proposed to deal with the threat of a nuclear war.